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Simon Singh Talks With Wired About His Libel Battle
smellsofbikes writes "Wired has a short but pithy interview with Simon Singh about his defense against a libel suit brought by the British Chiropractic Association, in which he spent more than $200,000 and emerged victorious."
"yet it happily promotes bogus treatments" does not necessarily imply dishonesty, it can also imply ineptitude or idiocy. So ruling that he was claiming they were intentionally promoting bogus treatments and knew and believed they were bogus infers something from the statement that does not necessarily exist.
People have the same problems interpreting the English language when it comes to the second amendment in the US Constitution. The "well regulated militia" clause is parenthetical but through willful idiocy or intentional sophistry some try to claim it's some kind of limiter or restriction.
So Singh believes in Global Warming, and that anyone who is against it isn't credible because by his numbers 98% of Climate Scientists believe in it being Real and Dangerous. Here's my take on that:
I remember the 1970's plenty well enough to recall that the great fear then was, are you ready for this, Global Cooling! The Earth was going to freeze in 30 years and we were all going to die through mass starvation because crops wouldn't grow. And yes, the Climate Scientists of that time were all behind that farce as well. How quickly things change.
Before you take Global Warming as your next panic attack, answer the following 3 questions:
1: Is the Earth getting warmer?
2: Even if #1 is true, is it human caused?
3: Even if #1 and #2 are true, can humans actually do anything about it?
Unless you can answer all three of the above questions with an unqualified YES, don't panic and don't suddenly feel that the only solution is the spending of hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth transfer (to enrich those in the environmentally blessed Green Industries), and don't buy into the radicals who believe that the only solution is to take us back to the Stone Age.
Singh, you may be right about Chiropracticy and I agree with you there, but you aren't even close to selling me on Global Warming as being anything other than natural cycles that we've gone through at least 8 of in recorded geologic history well before humans could have had any effect on it at all. Until you can explain the equally obvious global warming on Mars at present as somehow caused by human activity don't ask me to destroy my lifestyle over something I can't actually affect anyway.
And one last point. Despite claims to the contrary, we do not have wonderfully accurate temperature records over the last 100 years. This is my field and I know how even the most modern temperature sensors in common use are often biased and surprisingly inaccurate. Yet Climate Scientists are relying on manually read thermometers, often improperly placed initially or in areas now recently developed, to bolster their cause. And they throw out entirely the 33% of the data that doesn't support their cause at all. Tell me that you have devastatingly accurate temperature data from even 50 years ago and I'll call you a Liar right to your face. Singh may need to learn a bit more on just how inaccurate most of our historical readings truly are -- but that's not his field.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
OTOH my sleep apnea and trouble swallowing mysterious went away when I started seeing a chiropractor. As did my migraines. But hey, why let a reasonably explainable treatment get in the way of bashing complementary medicine.